Raleigh police charge inmate with murder for 2007 shooting

A North Carolina inmate was indicted today for the murder of a man more than four years ago in a shooting at a residence on Somerset Road.

Montez Antonio Stevons, 24, is charged with shooting and killing Albert Louis Imes, then 63 years old, in his home in the early morning of Dec. 12, 2007. Police spokesman Jim Sughrue said the arrest comes after “extensive investigative work by Raleigh Police Department homicide detectives," adding that the investigation remains ongoing.

Stevons, who has a lengthy criminal record, is serving a five- to seven-year sentence at Marion Correctional Institution in connection for an armed robbery that occurred on Nov. 3, about a month before Imes’ death.

Prosecutors at the time also suspected Stevons, along with two others, in the Nov. 26, 2007, shooting death of Eva Maria Johnson-Jacobs, then 49, at her Orange County residence. Reshaun Marshall Crates pleaded guilty to second degree murder in the case, but prosecutors could not put together enough evidence to hold Stevons or Done Octavous Johnson.

Jim Woodall, district attorney for Orange and Chatham counties, said in court that he believed Stevons to be the shooter, but ran up against uncooperative witnesses.

“Everybody involved in this had been in a gang together in Durham,” Woodall had said then. “There’s a code of silence.”

Crates was sentenced to 12 to 16 years in prison in late 2009, partially because a witness finally agreed to testify that Crates had confessed to him.

Sughrue said Stevons is expected to be transported to Raleigh to be served with the indictments for Imes’ murder and armed robbery in the near future.